Microsoft reportedly ready to name new CEO, may replace Bill Gates as chairman - Page 2

Good, bad or ugly, Microsoft will always be around, in one form or another.

As for CEO's and their decisions that involve corporations, never underestimate anyone. Once upon a time, who would have thought that Steve Jobs would have "made up" with Bill Gates and brought half decent Microsoft products back to the Mac platform.

Make no mistake, these are big boys playing big games. One day, Microsoft may even start making deals with Apple again...

Microsoft is in a terrible position right now. They are making decent profit on business tools/services, but consumers are going elsewhere.

I think we are at the peak of microsoft, and the decline is about to hit hard in the coming 10 years. It does not matter who leads msft, it´s monopoly is falling apart without them being able to control or stop it. It´s done.

Microsoft peaked 10 years ago. They haven't come up with a good idea since the Xbox an windows XP. Granted Win 7 was a good product. They are always behind their competitors.

I'm still trying to understand why Microsoft needs to be in the enterprise and consumer space as one company. Seems to me it would make more sense to split Microsoft into two companies. One larger enterprise focused company that would compete with the likes of Oracle and IBM and A smaller consumer focused company that would comprise of Xbox, Surface, Windows Phone, etc. I doubt this will happen but I think it makes the most sense.

I'm still trying to understand why Microsoft needs to be in the enterprise and consumer space as one company. Seems to me it would make more sense to split Microsoft into two companies. One larger enterprise focused company that would compete with the likes of Oracle and IBM and A smaller consumer focused company that would comprise of Xbox, Surface, Windows Phone, etc. I doubt this will happen but I think it makes the most sense.

It will never happen because, I would think, it would be impossible to do frankly. Microsoft is Microsoft. I just can't see them changing, especially to that degree.

EDIT: BTW, that's not a criticism. My "I hate Microsoft" days are over. I may not respect a lot of what they do, but clearly in certain areas they do well.

I think no matter who goes in as CEO of Microsoft is doomed. The company is so messed up right now, people will expect an immediate turn around (like always). When it doesn't happen, they'll be forced out for another CEO. I would really hate to be the CEO of Microsoft. There's a lot of things to fix and some unpopular (and maybe very popular) decisions to be made to do a turn around. I for one would not stick with the Metro interface for Windows 9. Windows needs to be a desktop OS, not a mobile OS morphed into a desktop OS. In the long run I bet you'll see that touchscreen laptops and desktops are not the way to go so their metro interface is useless if this proves to me true. It makes sense on a phone or a tablet, but not a computer.

As much as we all don't like Microsoft, I don't necessarily want to see them totally fail. I actually hope they do turn it around and Apple has some other form of competition. It could actually help Apple because even if Microsoft doesn't really keep up with Apple, they could at least give Google and Samsung a run for their money, especially in the tablet and phone space. At this time, I think its best they try and go after this and if they succeed, then try to go after Apple. You'd already be on your way if you succeed in taking either Google and/or Samsung down.

My prediction is that M$ has now enter the era of revolving door CEO, it will be no surprise to me to see no CEO last there more than 2 yrs. This guy will be given a short period of time to turn things around, and he will fail, and they will move onto the next person.

Ballmer only last as long as he did due to his long history with the company and probably being friends with Gates, and it is easy to run a company which money just pours in and you really do not have to do anything right.

I'm done with Microsoft products. We use Office in our business, primarily Word. And the only reason I'm using it is because all the other businesses I deal with use Word (we swap documents). But when Microsoft switched to licensing Office instead of out right purchase, no more. I will use the version I have until it no longer functions. Then I'll make the switch to something that is compatible.

I have Pages, and that does what I need a word processing program to do. And without hogging memory or crashing.Edited by oneof52 - 1/31/14 at 8:00am

My prediction is that M$ has now enter the era of revolving door CEO, it will be no surprise to me to see no CEO last there more than 2 yrs. This guy will be given a short period of time to turn things around, and he will fail, and they will more onto the next person.

Ballmer only last as long as he did due to his long history with the company and probably being friends with Gates, and it is easy to run a company which money just pours in and you really do not have to do anything right.

Even MS having to hold onto legacy systems is painful to think about. Consumers and businesses alike need to move on from the 10 year old systems and software they're using. There just isn't a good excuse for not upgrading computers, systems, apps. Sure, there may be a couple of titles of software where the sw company itself hasn't upgraded, but they should be punished for not doing so. Keeping customers working on software and/or hardware that is 5 or 10 years old is inexcusable.

I don't agree. Let's look at what a typical office worker uses: Mail, Word, Excel, a browser and perhaps some internal enterprise systems: accounts receivable, accounts payable, perhaps an app to log hours and maybe some specialty app for the particular line of business the company is in (which is most likely to be a web-based app anyway), etc.

What functions is a five-year-old app missing that a newer version of that software would have? Little that I can think of. In fact, one could make the case that because of feature bloat and more recent versions of these apps having inferior UIs (the Office ribbon, etc.) that the older apps are actually better.

Likewise for the hardware. Five-year-old hardware (except perhaps for storage space issues and virus issues) is more than sufficient to run those apps. It's only workers who do programming, design, video, audio, photography and other high resource applications who might need a newer, more powerful computer.

I think no matter who goes in as CEO of Microsoft is doomed. The company is so messed up right now, people will expect an immediate turn around (like always). When it doesn't happen, they'll be forced out for another CEO. I would really hate to be the CEO of Microsoft. There's a lot of things to fix and some unpopular (and maybe very popular) decisions to be made to do a turn around. I for one would not stick with the Metro interface for Windows 9. Windows needs to be a desktop OS, not a mobile OS morphed into a desktop OS. In the long run I bet you'll see that touchscreen laptops and desktops are not the way to go so their metro interface is useless if this proves to me true. It makes sense on a phone or a tablet, but not a computer.

As much as we all don't like Microsoft, I don't necessarily want to see them totally fail. I actually hope they do turn it around and Apple has some other form of competition. It could actually help Apple because even if Microsoft doesn't really keep up with Apple, they could at least give Google and Samsung a run for their money, especially in the tablet and phone space. At this time, I think its best they try and go after this and if they succeed, then try to go after Apple. You'd already be on your way if you succeed in taking either Google and/or Samsung down.

The only messed up thing about Microsoft that I can see here is your opinion about them.